He believes that 297 years were made up, after Pope Sylvester II, Holy Roman Emperor Otto III, and Byzantine Emperor Constantine VII came up with a plan to invent a period of time and the events that occurred during it.

It must be noted that during the time when Illig has proposed that this happened, the majority of the masses were incredibly downtrodden and uneducated.

There were only a very few select people who were educated enough to properly understand the world, and these were the people that ruled it. It does seem somewhat conceivable that the ruling leaders would have the intellect and arrogance to think something like this up, and have the right kind of people underneath them to believe it.

Illig states that there just isn’t enough evidence of historical events between the years 614 AD and 911 AD to prove that these years really happened.

He says that the lull in events during this time compared to the vastly more exciting events that occurred at either side of these dates means that these years simply did not exist.